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If Bluebubblelab’s technology was available at the time Steve Jobs was around, maybe he would not have affirmed that “market research is useless.” Image via CrunchBase

Imagine a world where all the ads and offers you come across are targeted to you. Today, this is already happening online. The ads you see in your own personal computer are most probably not the same your mother will see if she access the same website from her own computer. BluebubbleLab is innovating the targeted reality we experience online and is bringing it to the offline world as well by providing tools that change the way we get offers and ads, making them relevant based not only on who we are but also on the mood we are in.

Imagine the scene: A man is waiting for the bus with his 9-year-old daughter and there is one of those digital billboards besides them. This billboard has a special software that identifies both the man and his daughter. Thus, it displays ads targeting each one of them. For instance, the father would see a Heineken advertisement and after that the daughter would see a Disneyland ad on the same digital billboard. I asked BluBubbleLab CEO Ben Van Dongen, What if there are 30 people waiting at the bus stop? What is the billboard going to display? “In this case the billboard would calculate an average of everyone who is present and display the most relevant ad for that audience.”

One of BluebubbleLab’s key products is a software that can read people’s faces and describe their emotions. It is similar to what we see in the movie Minority Report, except that Tom Cruise’s character lives in the year 2054. The potential use of such a technology is mind-blowing. For example, it can be used in market research. There is endless evidence about the downsides of performing traditional market research by bringing people to a lab, giving them a product and asking what they think about it. Instead, Bluebubblelab allows companies to measure consumer reaction by analyzing their facial expressions while they test products, watch TV series or commercials at their own homes or anywhere else. Procter & Gamble,Unilever and Heineken have already used it. This video by BBC explains how Bluebubblelab is bringing us the future of advertising and market research. If Bluebubblelab’s technology was available at the time Steve Jobs was around, maybe he would not have affirmed that “market research is useless.”

According to Ben Van Dongen, CEO, “Our software allows us to understand people not by listening to what they tell us. It captures their subconscious response by looking at 128 micro muscles in someone’s face. The muscle movements are a direct result of subconscious processes, the part of our brain that is steering us to what we really want and think. Our software tells us if the person likes something or not and if he is happy or sad or puzzled. We do not only analyze emotional expressions but also measure eye tracking, behavior, facial recognition, attention time, head pose, and even more in the near future.”

I asked Paul Hiel, Business Development Director and Co-Founder at

BlueBubbleLab, if the software was accurate. “Our software has 80-98% confidence rate. It is able to see things better than humans. It took us one and a half years to make the algorithms work on multiple operating systems and across a large variety of devices. People can use or solutions in Apps, TV’s, billboards, cameras, virtually anywhere.” I look forward to finding an app with such a technology to practice my poker face. Paul Hiel also shared the possibility of having this technology in cinemas. Imagine if movie producers could not only instantaneously know the age and gender of people in the audience but also in what exact second they laughed, cried or got angry or disappointed.

I am always searching for the next big thing, I have visited Google’s office in Israel and analyzed Brazil’s top 10 most innovative companies. However, I haven’t come across anything as awe-inspiring. I strongly believe Blubebubblelab has what it takes to become a game changer. The Dutch BlueBubbleLab is bringing us the future, today. We know that revolutions often begin with a visionary leader, so I asked Ben Van Dongen, how did it all started?

I wanted to disrupt the advertising industry! I came up with the idea because I got pissed off with all the messages that were not for me, not only on TV but also online and offline. I started to look for solutions to really understand human beings and found an algorithm that uses cameras to understand people. I visited the university of Amsterdam and during the course of a conversation with Professor Gevers and his PhD student Roberto Valenti we discovered a way to bundle their many years of research with our idea of the potential in the market and create the software and solutions we have today.

What about security and privacy concerns?

We follow privacy laws from around the world carefully. We do not violate these laws and regulations at all. We are transparent about what we do and don’t. We don’t record videos, we don’t store pictures, it is all algorithms. We recognized you as an algorithm. We don’t store your name, just preferences we measure. Even if you knew the key to unlock our algorithm you wouldn’t find anything about persons.

BlueBubbleLab also showed me how we will interact with television in the future. Imagine that everything you see on TV will be clickable. For instance, you are watching Sex and the city and you like Sarah Jessica Parker’s dress. With one click you can see how much it costs, and with another click you can instantaneously choose your seize and buy it. Another example, you are watching the two goals Messi scored against Mallorca on TV at your house, with one click you see the details of his soccer outfit, choose your seize, and with another click you can buy it and have it delivered to your place. Wow! Goal by BlueBubbleLab! We will have to keep the remote control away from impulsive people from now on!